Connecting IDE disks & ISA (network) card to Dreamcast

[OzOnE]

OK, the first two adapters have been posted to Mr SWAT today.

It took a while because of this Country's stupid bank holidays, where everything takes a while to get back to normal
(ie. back to the normally overpriced and slow mail system).

I did try a cheap IDE-SATA adapter, but it sets the IDE side as "Master", so clashes with the stock GD drive.
The only way around this is if we can patch the BIOS for stand-alone operation, or if you can find a SATA adapter which supports Slave on the IDE side?

Here's a rough diagram of how to connect the adapters in the two most common ways....



As you can see, the "Normal" method is simple enough.

Another thing that will be improved on the next version is that I should have used four pins for the /RST signals (so you can use two jumpers side-by-side).

More updates soon.
Next thing to try is use two IDE-SATA adapters and see if the cable can be extended using only a SATA cable (and a few other thin wires for the CD Audio)...

DC -> Adapter -> IDE-SATA -> SATA cable -> SATA-IDE -> Adapter -> GD Drive.

EDIT: Oh, and also there is no oscillator on the adapters yet...
A BIOS patch will still be needed for Stand-alone mode, as the stock BIOS checks for the GD status at boot-up.
So, the oscillator alone will generally cause a black screen, or it won't boot into Dreamshell (from the DS BIOS).
I forgot that it only booted without the stock GDD before because I had my FPGA Emu plugged in.